MotorStorm

Pros:
+ An interesting thematic setting of Colorado's Monument Valley, embued by a festival aesthetic that cannot be better categorized than "Mad Max meets Burning Man"
+ While the soundtrack isn't specifically to my tastes, the hardcore, hard rock, and industrial tracks fit the setting extremely well, with big names such as Nirvana, QOTSA, Primal Scream and Curve as highlights
+ Graphical fidelity is very good for the year of release, with great animation, a solid framerate, and tasteful use of motion blur and camera flare effects. The team actually went out to Colorado and took thousands of pics and videos to recreate the area which is pretty cool
+ The ability to punch out other racers given you're both on a bike or ATV, or flick them off if they're in a car or truck was a really great touch
++ The single player campaign's progress is measured in tickets of single races with the only goal of winning, which is focused and promotes steady progress while reinforcing its arcade sensibilities
++ Track layout is consistently good across the board, with special attention paid to making sure no type of vehicle has any overwhelming advantage on a given track, given an equal skill level amongst drivers
++ Each track has effectively three tracks in one, with dedicated paths that prefer the bikes, big trucks, and mid-vehicles respectively, with chaotic choke points that bring everyone together.
++ The boost mechanic has a really good sense of speed and punishes overuse of it with longer cooldowns the more you use it, rewarding an extremely satisfying brake-boost-brake-boost gameplay loop that has you flying around the tracks as fast as possible.
++ Over-boosting actually explodes you in a forwards direction, which means it's actually tactically useful in a must-win-by-inches scenario. I've pulled it off a number of times and it's funny as fuck
++ Floaty but fair physics engine gives the suspension on stuff like the dune buggies and motorbikes a good sense of bounce and navigation over this rocky terrain without becoming overly sim-racer and hard as shit
++ Although the light vehicles are faster on neutral terrain, they can get absolutely fucking bodied by the big rigs which is a really cool cat-and-mouse dynamic to worry about. There are more than one events where you either play as one of many bikers racing a big rig or vice a versa where surviving is as difficult as maintaining a lead. It's cool that physicality amongst bigger racers is encouraged like that
+++ Despite a low overall track count, the campaign doesn't get stale because of events forcing you to drive a certain class of vehicle on a given track. The amount of permutations extends the challenge and really forces you to learn the ins and outs of every path on each track by the endgame
+++ Extremely fair difficulty curve even amongst tickets of the same "tier." I am pretty impatient and unskilled at racers outside of Mario Kart and even I was able to squeak out a large number of wins after some practice

Cons:
- The game features rubber-banding which can be an annoyance, but even though they can catch up it's quite rare any AI racers will overtake you and blow you out halfway through Lap 3 even on Level 4 tickets
- Extremely lengthy loading times, even for stuff as simple as picking a vehicle, kind of reveals a lack of total understanding of the PS3 hardware (which, in 2007, is fairly excusable IMO, but compare this to LBP1, for example)
- Despite having 5 models of each vehicle per class by the endgame, none of them have any differences amongst them outside of aesthetic differences, somewhat simplifying the depth of finding "your" vehicle of choice
- Soundtrack isn't nearly long enough (about 1:20:00 total) and you will be somewhat sick of the songs by the end of the game, which takes a little under 12 hours if you want to come in first every race
- Visual diversity amongst the tracks is pretty much non-existent, which can make long sessions feel sort of static. There are clear exceptions to this, though, notably the recurring free-for-all "Grizzly" track and the ridiculous and precarious "Rain God Mesa"
- Lack of splitscreen or local multiplayer, as well as the online servers getting shut down, means this is a strictly single-player game in 2018
- There are only 8 tracks in the entire game without DLC, which is useless to buy now since those tracks were online only. This is significantly mitigated by vehicle restrictions in the single player campaign mode as mentioned before, but still worth mentioning.